Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams
Score: 90% ESRB: Mature Publisher: Konami Developer: Konami Media: DVD/1 Players: 1 Genre: Survival Horror
Graphics & Sound: One thing's for sure--Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams looks nice and creepy. The graphics are gorgeous, in a dilapidated spooky sort of way, and you never feel the game dip and chug like so many do nowadays. The Xbox handles the game with aplomb, and while it never shines like Halo in terms of sheer magnitude of polygons pushed, the game definitely looks and feels sharp throughout. A big fuss has been made about the fact that you can turn off the graphics filter that gives the game its grainy look; I personally prefer the old film feel of the grain, and kept it that way. Hmph. The Xbox includes enhanced graphics, mainly in the way of lighting effects, and while they're not tremendous they'll definitely add a little pep to the game. The sound, as seems to be standard for the series, is solid. The music is good and atmospheric, the voice acting is squarely in the land of Standard Video Game Voice Acting but is nonetheless near the pinnacle of that land, and the sound effects are just as frighteningly creepy as they should be. This is one of those games that you play with the sound up high and in the middle of the night when you really want to scare yourself silly; there's enough things going bump in the night that your skin will crawl upon first experience.
Gameplay: All right, real quicklike for those of you curious: If you already own the PS2 version of Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams is a rental at best. The added adventure is short and the tweaks are minor. However, for those of you who don't own the game already, this Xbox release of the game is definitely superior to the PS2 version. It still didn't grip me quite the way that the original game did, but Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams is a solid adventure nonetheless. It's hard to talk much about a game like this without giving away salient plot points, so a brief rundown is all that can really be said. You are James Sunderland, a man bereaved by his wife's death three years ago. Which makes the receiving of a letter from said wife very bizarre, and of course James sets up to discover just what's going on in the sleepy town of Silent Hill. The omnipresent fog is back, and you'll once again be fighting to figure out just what's going on as you fight to defeat the enemies and puzzles in front of you. Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams sports a real-time 3D world, which means that it's rare that you're locked into the obnoxious camera angles of the Resident Evil series. Instead, the omnipresent evil is that of the fog, which forces you to swim in it and barely make out what's mere feet ahead of you. It's creepy, effective, and very cool. The core gameplay consists of the requisite enemies and puzzles that you've come to expect from the genre. The puzzles are usually pretty solid, lacking the random try-everything-with-everything mentality that many other games have, and while the solutions are occasionally from left field, they generally feel pretty solid. Combat is plenty solid as well, although it's damned near trivial on the easier difficulty settings. And the plotline is convoluted, as always. It's hard to say more without giving away parts of the game. The game itself isn't that long, spanning a dozen hours or so, but this is one of those games that definitely doesn't need to drag on for forty hours to tell its story. And, in the grand tradition of Silent Hill, this game sports multiple endings, which occur depending on the decisions that you make throughout the game. Figuring out how to get the different endings is often the greatest puzzle of all. Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams's biggest 'bullet point' is the addition of a new scenario. Originally intended to be almost as long as the main game, the side story realistically only takes a couple of hours at the long end to complete. Still, it's a nice little addition, one of the things which makes the Xbox version superior to the PS2 release.
Difficulty: You can choose the difficulty level of the battles and puzzles when you start the game, even making combat nonexistent. Real gamers, of course, should go with the highest settings for the true experience. Even then, the game isn't nearly impossible, and any veteran survival-horror gamer should have no problem with the hardest settings. Those who are just starting with the genre may be wise to pick lower settings, to get a feel for how the games work.
Game Mechanics: The game sports two primary control schemes--character relative, which is the standard for the genre, and a 2D control scheme more like 3D adventure games. Both work, but the 'survival horror' scheme supports strafing, which is handy at times. The clumsy Xbox controller makes playing the game a little more klutzy than playing it on my PS2 controller, but not enough so to take away from the experience. The load times are fairly minimal, the options are easy to configure, the menus easy to navigate, and I never experienced any major glitches as I played. The game is solid, that's for sure. Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams may not be the eternal classic that the original was--as entertaining as the game is, the story just didn't grip me quite the way that the original did--but, at least in gameplay, it's a superlative refinement of the earlier game. The Xbox version offers a few improvements on the PS2 release, and those improvements definitely make it the one to get if you have a choice; otherwise, the game is excellent on any system you can get it for. Just prepare to be a little . . . disturbed.
-Sunfall to-Ennien, GameVortex Communications AKA Phil Bordelon
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